News

A Productive weekend - Saving now 3-4 times faster

03 Feb 2013 15:30 +0000

This week we discussed saving times on the KPhotoAlbum IRC channel,
which made me give it a shot at rewriting the saving code from QDom to
QXmlStreamWritter. I had a hunch that it would give quite some nice
improvement in saving speed.

Now, if you have ever participated in one of my Qt training classes, you
will likely have heard me say something like NEVER EVER trust your own
hunches on where time is spend in your applications, USE A
PROFILER!. Rewriting the code resulted in a disappointing 10% time
reduction on saving, not the 50% or more I had hoped for. Sigh! Why do I
never listen to myself?!

OK, so when I had callgrind and kcachgrind in action anyway, I could
just as well look at what made it relatively slow at saving, and I found,
not surprisingly, that it spend quite a bit of time in places I wouldn't
have guessed in a million years. I got an impression 18% reduction simply
by caching whether the XML file should be in compressed or readable
format.

In total, depending on format used, and whether your KPhotoAlbum is
build in debug or release mode, I got a reduction of time spend when
saving between 62% and 73%, which means a speed up of 3-4.

Saving now takes less than 400ms on my database with 13800 images (of
which more than 95% are tagged). I guess it will be a while before I need
to revisit the speed of saving :-)

KPhotoAlbum 4.3

New features were described when announcing the
beta version. Only minor bug fixing and addition of pattern based search
was done since then.

— Miika

KPhotoAlbum 4.3-beta1

07 Sep 2012 06:03 +0000

Whe have a beta build available for the upcoming KPhotoAlbum 4.3.
Give it a spin and give feedback to the mailing list (IRC and
bug tracking are also viable options).

New features concentrate on video support improvements and background
tasks. Also the database backend has been dropped completely leaving the
XML backend as the only option. Automatic stacking of images based on
file version detection has been brought to the maintenance menu giving
control to the user instead of only performing the action upon starting
of KPhotoAlbum.

— Miika

Tutorial on new video features

18 Aug 2012 20:21 +0000

Jesper has posted a video tutorial
on YouTube demonstrating the new features that are available on the
current development version of KPhotoAlbum.

— Miika

New features for a test run

31 Jul 2012 04:38 +0000

There are some new features to test out on our git repository (master
branch). They are mostly related to how videos are handled but also
background job queue is implemented and some refactoring done, including
removal of SQL backend. Any feedback is appreciated before pushing out a
new release.